slash ai

First Published: 2025-09-26 Last Updated: 2025-09-26

When I hear people talk about AI, internally, I like to substitute "Artificial Intelligence" with "Abominable Inference" instead. (Thank you Warhammer 40k for the inspiration to swap artificial to abominable, swapping intelligence for inference and combining the two is however an Anton original - or at least I came up with it independently). I feel it better explains what's going on, inference in that the math suggests xyz should happen next (be it large language models, or stable diffusion), and the abominable because it rarely feels like a force for "good" to me.

I can't wait to see the bubble burst, and for the technology to return to something of a fringe interest to nerds who want to see how many tokens per second their 8 GPU's which can output 1 point twenty one jigowatts worth of processing instead of the current inflated hype machine which promises that line will go up

It is somewhat useful at times to act as a force multiplier, especially in my day job as a programmer, but I find I need to be very specific about what I need it to do, and by the time I properly explain the task at hand, it probably would've been faster for me to code it myself. I find this especially true if I then have to go back and get it to refine it's approach, or fix up errors and logical misunderstandings manually. It is one hell of a crutch when it's 4:45pm on a friday and I just need a quick script to do something one time, where I'll never need to maintain or touch it again. It's like an incredibly eager intern who will occasionally just make up stuff in the hope that it makes you happy, until you find that function_xyz doesn't exist and you tell it off for hallucinating.

I've also found searching the web itself, to slowly become a worse and worse experience which AI appears to be, immune, or at least resistant to. I have mercifully been spared the infamous Google AI summaries while searching as I moved to duckduckgo sometime back in 2019, but this degradation seemed to follow me even there. I was finding myself using the occasional AI tool to find information I needed if I wasn't sure where I'd need to look, and while I have now set up my own SearXNG server which feels like I've been able to get around some of the pitfalls of so much of the web being so geared for SEO, sometimes AI is just better at getting the answer I need.

All the content written on the pages here on my site written by me alone. This is a hobby, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing myself.